While Origin will be the exclusive digital retailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic (in other words, if you want to buy it online and download it, you’ll do so through Origin) that does not mean that Origin is required for you to access or play The Old Republic.

Origin is a digital storefront, and the desktop application is there to give you quick access to Origin exclusives and deals.

However, you won’t need to launch the Origin application to run The Old Republic, nor will you patch the game via Origin. Once the game is on your hard disk, you’ll be connecting to our servers to patch and launch the game, and Origin does not have to be running to do that.

To answer another question - boxed versions of the game will include the client on DVD(s).

In principle I agree that I don't really want EA to make all of their games exclusive to Origin. But in the same vein, they haven't actually said they are going to do that. So far we have one game that will be exclusive, and that's SWTOR. If we start seeing more, then I'll become worried at that point, but pre-worrying about something that we don't know will happen seems pointless.

You're entitled to your opinion but I can't really agree with that. It is a foregone conclusion that publishers will push it as far as they can these days. I'd rather worry about it when it's possible to do something about it, however minor that may be rather than after the fact when your options are more limited.

Crap, was hoping I missed it. Oh well, it's not really a big deal, just a nuisance at times.

There are a ton of minor things like this in Steam that suck but their competitors continually drop the ball in capitalizing on them. I had to laugh when I logged into Origin for the first time and was greeted with a 513 ITTR SERVER ERROR? text below the navigation pane. You'd figure EA would want to sell other peoples games too, they can take a big cut from every sale. The community features are rudimentary at best. The only thing I can say it has over Steam is the ability to not run it when playing games which is kind of ironic when you think about it.